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At a glance, the Cadillac looks out of place here, like a junior-high kid elbowing his way into the kindergarten sandbox. There's no denying the dimensional differences. The upstart Detroit sports sedan is longer, wider, taller, and heavier than either of its German opponents. It's also substantially more powerful, with 400 horsepower and 395 pound-feet of torque on tap from its 5.7-liter pushrod V-8, an engine that also sees service in Corvettes.

On the other hand, its pricing is right in step with die Deutschen, and so is its straight-line performance, despite a substantial edge in engine output. Thanks to its relative heft, at 4.8 seconds the Caddy was a 10th slower to 60 mph than the bad-boy Benz and nudged the Mercedes by a mere bumper in the quarter-mile: 13.2 seconds at 109 mph. However, these numbers are substantially better than the ones we recorded for a very early production CTS-V last March. Although rear-wheel hop is still a problem in all-out launches, it was easier to manage in this car, knocking 0.4 second off the 0-to-60 time and a half-second off the quarter-mile performance. Cadillac ads claim 4.6 seconds to 60, but this is the best we've managed so far.

There were some other welcome improvements over that first test car. For example, Cadillac finally has the calibration squared away on the car's oil-temperature gauge, a source of erroneously high readings in early cars. Even more welcome, the programming for the stability-control system isn't as intrusive as it was in our first test, and we also know the secret of shutting it off completely: Hold down the control switch for five seconds. However, another anomaly prevented us from comparing on-and-off performance at the track. We recorded a series of laps with the system on and were pleasantly surprised to find that the stability control allows the driver some liberties—a little oversteer mitigated by a nice sense of balance. But by the time we got around to trying some laps with the system switched off, we were plagued by an engine stumble exiting Nelson's carousel turn, a very long right-hander with a decreasing radius preceding the exit. The stumble showed up in our first traction-off lap, got much worse in the second lap, and the engine quit altogether in the third, whereupon we coasted all the way back to the pits. After sitting for a minute, it started right up, but our hot lapping was over.

With the gas gauge reporting just under a half-tank, we found it hard to believe that fuel starvation could be the culprit, but this was indeed the case, something confirmed by one of the CTS-V owners who experienced the same problem during this year's One Lap of America track events.

Nevertheless, fuel stumble and all, the Cadillac's first traction-off lap—1:20.52, 89.4 mph—was a 10th quicker than the best with the system on, and also the best of the day. What was left on the table is something we'll explore some other time. Still, we emerged with a unanimous sense of the CTS-V as the road-course champ. There was a little more vertical motion in the suspension than expected, the shifting of the six-speed gearbox wasn't as crisp as the Audi's, and the oversize bucket seat won't keep the driver centered behind the wheel, but for all that, the Caddy's Nürburgring racetrack development showed through.

The real world is not a racetrack, though, and on public roads, the Cadillac's logbook began accumulating black marks. The absence of a telescoping feature for the steering column, for example, makes it hard for tall testers to find an optimal driving position. A high cowl reduces forward sightlines. Clutch effort became tedious in stop-and-go traffic. A power point—for radar detectors, etc.—interfered with shifting into fifth or reverse.

The dashboard's discordant festival of textures, angles, and contours was a turnoff to some, and for all its size, the Caddy's rear seats didn't offer any roominess edge. We were particularly surprised at the limited headroom back there, since the Caddy's roofline, at apogee, is 1.1 inches higher than the Audi's and 1.7 inches taller than that of the Benz. And we still haven't learned to love this car's angular styling.

Although the CTS-V's value rating was strong, it fared worse in areas related to refinement: driver comfort, ergonomics, and engine noise, vibration, and harshness. It was by far the noisiest at wide-open throttle, prompting one tester to write that it came across as "the muscle car of the group," which in this case is a tepid accolade.